Sandy Ikeda writes today about the origins of spontaneous order, of things that humans created but did not design. Languages, money, and markets are absolutely essential to our survival. But could a person invent them from scratch?

For illustration, Ikeda asks us to imagine a “genius caveman.” What if some wonderfully precocious prehistoric person dreamed up the iPad? If he knew exactly what he needed to build the device, down to the last line of code, could he bring it off?